On the left side: The Trump administration, professing profound concern about an imminent threat to consumers, is filing suit to block the takeover of TimeWarner by AT&T.

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The Justice Department's anti-trust division credibly alleges that a new corporation combining one company's trove of content with the other's dominant delivery system would have dangerous power to jack up prices and unfairly outflank competitors.

Eight years after the Obama-era DOJ okayed without major modifications a similar vertical consolidation, the swallowing of NBC Universal by Comcast, the shift marks a bold attempt to draw a new legal line in the sand.

Now, look over at the right side of the screen: The very same Trump administration, blithely unconcerned about the power it is about to give to cable companies and other internet service providers, is reversing course on net neutrality.

In 2015, the Federal Communications Commission laid down landmark protections designed to ensure that the companies that control the internet's pipes couldn't game consumers and kill upstart competitors in the crib.

In other words, Comcast or Spectrum or Cox couldn't slow or black out Netflix or Amazon in order to sell you their own speedier on-demand video service.

While those rules didn't prevent any customer from paying more to get faster data or special content, they did bar providers from carving up the internet into cable-style packages.

The FCC said: If you pay for the internet, you should really get the unadulterated internet.

Under new chairman Ajit Pai, Trump's FCC now moves to tilt the level playing field that net neutrality protects — giving the internet's behemoths free rein to control much more of what their consumers access online, in order to better their bottom lines.

Meantime, the same FCC has just okayed new consolidation of local media, letting a single company own a television, radio and newspaper in the same place.

So: An administration that's deeply concerned about the pernicious effects of media consolidation on consumers is simultaneously laissez-faire about the very same subject.